


she who swallows the sun

by creabimus



Category: Ava's Demon
Genre: F/F, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-02-13 08:06:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12979737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creabimus/pseuds/creabimus
Summary: Ava, and the aftermath of the massacre.





	she who swallows the sun

The haze of smoke lifts completely. 

Ava watches her body from above at the dawning of the new world, and she follows herself through the ash-snow and rivers of dried lava to the beginning of her new life.

Wrathia will reveal everything to her soon, but not yet. 

Odin, wandering through the wasteland. Two young girls who look like him, hopping like birds through a forest. Maggie and Gil, gauging and disbelieving as they trek. Ava sees all of this, yet she doesn’t see all of this because her body is not with them. She might see all of this in her mind because she might believe she is out of her body and existing elsewhere, yet a soul cannot exist without an anchor. 

Red lines the edges of her vision. Lava rivers spiderweb across her line of sight then, in a blink, disappear and her vision returns to its original state. Her back aches, and her vertebrae puncture holes in the skin pulled across her back. The cells were knit together long ago, over fifteen years, but they might finally stretch and break. Dry skin is only one ramification of the sweltering heat, and gods is it warm. Shades of pink morph from the red bordering her vision; if only, with her balled fists, Ava could rub the smudges away.

Burning sugar wafts upwards into the air, into Ava’s open mouth, into her lungs. Caramel. Sickly sweet. Caramelization was one of Maggie’s talents; she learned it from her father. Making caramel, she told Ava, was easy because you had to burn it. Destruction with ultimate worth. The ends justify the means. Burning sugar is easy, Maggie said, but, with one finger tracing the petals of a yellow flower, it doesn’t always produce caramel. It’s a waiting game, you see. Let the sugar molten without interfering. Don’t push your luck. Wait, and then you’ll be rewarded with your sweet spoils.

A dream never felt so real. Not even the daydreams.

Sweet caramel.

Maggie’s fingers in her hair, curling (both hair and fingers). A swell of laughter followed by a denouement, then a smile followed by a light touch of a palm against Ava’s cheek. Intimacy was learned through a period of time, but Maggie seemed born with the innate ability to attract and give physical affection. Her brown eyes lit up a your passionate ramblings, her shoulders angled towards you, her lips quirked upwards and slightly parted, just waiting to ask a question perfectly matched with the topic at hand. Flowers bloom all seasons. Maggie is proof of that. Was. 

Burning sugar, as it happens, occurs more often than not.

Ava’s feet touch the ground. Her toes curl into the loose topsoil and she thinks of the summers on Naleme. While the sun kissed the ocean at the end of each day, Ava sifted her toes through the sand and fell backwards. Her loose hair tangled around her face as the wind blew it around, but with her toes and fingers worming through the grit she plastered a smile on her face. Peace, and silence, and the warmth of life. At last.

There were people on those beaches as there were people in this room. They’ve gone like those on Naleme, Ava assumes, shipped off to other planets and given new lives and new families and new dreams and new sunsets on beaches. TITAN, she realizes, did this. TITAN coats the air in ash and flame, like a layer of paint that hasn’t quite dried completely so you can still smell the tinge of change. Holograms would have more empathy than them.

Ava’s hands ball into fists. Her nails dig into her palms. She remembers clipping them three days ago, and they never grew back to their previous length in four. Her heart hammers against her ribcage, and the warmth which flows through her vessels feels sweltering. Sweat beads on her forehead. 

How did she end up on the ground and surrounded by pillars of rock?

They’d jeered. She’d been called up to the platform, she remembers that now. With Odin’s jacket swallowing her body, the scent of burning foliage sunk into her skin. Florem Mortem. Kids smoked it sometimes, in the shadows of the abandoned industrial sector that they used as a hangout point. Or so Maggie told Ava when the two were still running laps around each other. The best fabrication won, and the runner up dealt with the reality of last place. 

Odin was one of those kids, then. But he wasn’t from Naleme, so he wouldn’t have been on the reeducation planet, so he couldn’t have. Perhaps elsewhere, on another planet, there are the same echoes. Wrathia seems determined that reality exists. What Wrathia believes, so should Ava, if only to grab hold of her new life and reign supreme over a meadow of yellow coreopsis. 

One day. 

All those people disappeared. Good riddance. They never cared about her, never asked why a young girl should be chosen. They could’ve used their own selfishness as an excuse, then they wouldn’t have disappeared. 

“Ava…”

The steady beating of her heart pushes blood through her vessels. Warm, red, oxygenated. Thick blood that stains the walls, cotton tunics and shirts. Ava’s head pounds. Why would she think about blood splatters now? Blood runs thick as lava, hot as lava, red as fire. She can taste the iron on her tongue but cannot find the cut in her mouth. Perhaps it’s old blood. Or even a phantom sensation. 

“Ava, dear…”

This isn’t Wrathia or some cruel imitation. 

The beach dissolved into the ocean one grain of sand at a time, so perhaps this is how the rest of the people from this room disappeared. One cell at a time. 

“Oh, Ava…”

Her blood isn’t blood. Something burns within her, an unending blaze of anger and grief. They should’ve said something, someone should’ve said something, but the crowd spat her out as quickly as it swallowed her. Its gaping mouth had two uses. A double-edged sword, as it were. Lies and truth are the same, parallel lines might eventually meet, there is no discounting what could be. 

Ava’s vision blurs. Tears drip off her nose and stain the topsoil. She rubs at her eyes with her arms with such ferocity that she might rub the truth out of her mind, too. Death is a faraway thing. 

Burning sugar doesn’t always make caramel.


End file.
